SOURCE: "Kaye Boyle's Story of a Moral Crisis," in New York Times Book Review, November 12, 1933, p. 9.

In the following review of Gentlemen, I Address You Privately, Kronenberger states that although Boyle enjoys moments of genius in this novel, she fails to sustain the quality.

It is only recently that we have had much fiction in English whose predominating note is that of sensibility. Our older novelists flirted with the same note; but Meredith, Jane Austen, Henry James impress us, in the long run, as really psychologists or novelists of manners. It is among certain recent women writers—Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and latterly Kay Boyle—that sensibility seems to dwarf all other characteristics. The world they present to us has been refined and smoothed down; it is a world under glass, so to speak. They convey to us a special and overexquisite feeling for life; and...